PHP++, Planning, BitCoin, and Concurrency

Solve Hard Things Early — Build great habits around communication and decision-making when everyone still knows each other well.

Marginally Useful (Paul Ford) — The last two decades have suggested a post-scarcity economy, where infinite copies of attractive digital things have a price approaching $0. Maybe that was merely a passing moment that we will look back upon with wonder once limited coins enforce scarcity—once the owner of a piece of digital art can look upon it with satisfaction and know with total, cryptographic certainty that because he paid for it, it belongs to him and no one else.

Velocity 2013 Speaker Series

I want to start by thanking John and Steve for the warm welcome. They’ve created something very amazing with Velocity, and I’m excited to be a part of it.

It might seem a bit odd to talk about What’s Next at the beginning of a conference, but I figure the best time to go to the bank and ask for a loan is when you actually have some money.

What we’ve been talking about at Velocity, especially the DevOps side of things, is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to how businesses are changing. And that shift is from the sequential to the concurrent. It used to be that we threw things over a series of walls, from Product Management to Design, to Development, to QA, to Production, to Customer Service and so on. That was an old world of software and one-year development cycles.

OSCON 2013 Speaker Series

Go is the first major systems language to emerge in over a decade, even though computing continues to change at a rapid pace—computers are smaller, faster, and can execute operations in parallel via multi core processors. Even languages like Python and Ruby have grown in popularity in recent years among system administrators, operations, and DevOps personnel. Yet, as a relatively new kid on the block, Go is a versatile and robust language that has plenty to offer.

Concurrency: Go provides support for concurrent execution and communication. There is no need to learn multiple ways of dealing with threads. Go greatly simplifies threading by providing goroutines and channels.

Fast compilation: Go compiles at a break-neck speed. It has robust dependency analysis and a rigid dependency specification to avoid wasting time with unused dependencies.

One binary to rule them all: Have you ever had to distribute your script or binary to multiple systems, then worry about libraries and dependencies in general? With Go, you simply don’t have to worry about dependencies. Gc, Go’s default compiler statically links its binaries. You can use go build to compile your code and then distribute it to multiple machines with minimal effort.

Readability: Go ceases the debate about the best style of programming by providing a code formatter tool (gofmt) and enforcing it in its standard library. The code you write today will be much easier to read and maintain in a few months or even years by simply sticking to gofmt.

Mobile Money, Actors in java, Actors in python, and a Decision-Making Tool

Mobile Money (The Economist) — Many people know that “mobile money”—financial transactions on mobile phones—has taken off in Africa. How far it has gone, though, still comes as a bit of a shock. Three-quarters of the countries that use mobile money most frequently are in Africa, and mobile banking in some of them has reached extraordinary levels.

Loom.io Project — help crowdfund a collaborative decision-making tool. They’re using it as they build the tool, and it’s the implementation of a process they use in real life. I know many organisations who need a free open-source web application that helps groups make better decisions together. You should probably read more about the interesting company Enspiral which is behind loom.io.